Abstract
Only ten years ago the New Anthropometric History started to explore the steadily changing body morphology in Switzerland during the last 200 years. A positive secular height trend began in the birth years of the 1870s. The 19-years-old Swiss conscripts gained a total of 15 cm in average height until nowadays, the increase in stature is also observable in adult male and female passport applicants, convicts, women voluntarily serving in the Swiss Army and schoolchildren at all ages all over Switzerland. The phenomenon remains to be satisfactorily explained. Among other clustering co-factors massively improving living conditions (nutrition, disease environment and physical work loads) may also be responsible for the secular height trend. In recent decades, the height increase rates have markedly slowed down, all of the factors contributing have yet to be identified. In contrast to height, the trend in average weight did not slow down down but accelerated. Since the end of the 1980s, the Swiss are no longer getting taller, but constantly more and more overweight and obese. Overall, the Swiss example may demonstrate the mismatch between the evolved biology of the human body and modern life: the survival advantages of the ability to store fat in the unstable agrarian society became a disadvantage in modern times. Today, a complex of genetic, epigenetic, and environmental factors are at work that both limit height growth and promote body breadth and overweight.
Staub, Kaspar